A generation ago a national minimum wage had the support of Socialists of the school of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and of J. A. Hobson.[78] For a long time it was not orthodox. I remember hearing a Professor of Political Economy speaking on this subject twice, at an interval of about ten years. The first time he summed up against it, pointing out how a minimum tended, in Australian experience, to become a maximum, with certificates of invalidism or incapacity easily obtainable to authorize a lower wage. The second time he was for a minimum wage, as what progressive thinkers hoped for. The steps have, of late, become rapid. Miners had their wages fixed by the Government after the Coal Strike of 1912, and again, after the Sankey Commission in 1919. The Railway and Transport Workers are also under Government protection. An international Labour Charter is part of the Peace of Versailles, which must lead to an international minimum. It will be a delicate undertaking to work it out with any completeness. Within a nation the cost of living varies from place to place; the value of money rises and falls as general prices fall or rise. Internationally, between San Francisco, New York, London, Constantinople, and Yokohama, the differences forbid uniformity of wage. Nobody can compel an employer to employ anybody whose work results in no profit. Some people exist who are not worth a minimum wage, unless it is too low to be acceptable. There will have to be provision for these. Pensions for Old Age and invalidity will assume larger proportions. The race will have to worry out this complex tangle of man with his environment. What is clear is that we have reached the Ruskinian standpoint about it.
_Fors Clavigera_ is the most remarkable of the writings of Ruskin. He who has read _Fors_, or a large part of it, knows Ruskin, and if he loves and reveres the author, has become a Ruskinian. But without reading _Fors_ no man or woman can become a Ruskinian. In it you become intimate with the man. He talks to you like a friend, button-holes you very much as Socrates did, invites you to laugh with him, and join in laughs at himself, tells you all his troubles, and the causes of the ups and downs of his spirits, tells you of his loneliness and his hopes and intentions, shows you his accounts every month, tells you where he has lost money, and to whom he has given it away, lets you see his letters and his replies to them, and holds you, by the personal power of him, while he pours vials of prophetic denunciation upon Society only to be equalled in the pages of the Hebrew Prophets; and then clinches it all with “Mind you, I mean every word of it; no exaggeration here.”